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Middle and Upper School Arts News & Stories

Eighth Graders Bring "The Jungle Book" to Life for Lower School Students

Posted 12/04/2014 01:57PM

If you were a Middle School actor in search of an audience for your performance of a classic children’s book, where would you turn?

For Ms. Eastman’s eighth-grade acting class, the answer was practically around the corner—at the Lower School, to be precise.

“The assignment was to perform a piece based on The Jungle Book,” Eastman explains. “They first performed it for the children in the Infant Toddler Center on campus. When they heard about how great it was, Head of Middle School Milton Sipp and Mike Sclafani, Dean of Students for the eighth grade, told us we had to perform it for our youngest students (in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade).”

Rebecca Greller, Director of Early Learning at the Lower School, said the younger students loved seeing the Middle School students perform. They enjoyed the interactive nature of the performance, which allowed them to participate as wolves, snakes, and even the wind and thunder at one point. They also enjoyed the actors’ realistic portrayals of monkeys, Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, Shere Khan the tieger, and Kaa the python, among other characters.

For their part, the Middle School students were happy to be on the River Campus, where many of them attended the Lower School themselves. “Several of them asked me if they could visit with their former teachers before we came back to the Hill Campus,” Eastman said. “They really enjoyed sharing The Jungle Book with the Lower School.”